You Eat What You Are, Pt. 2 A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

Stephen J. DUBNER: This is the Camino Real farmer’s market in Goleta, California. It’s in Santa Barbara County, about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The produce is bountiful, and it’s local…

[SANTA BARBARA FARMER’S MARKET]

[SHOPPER] You use that on ribs?

[SHOPPER] Yeah! It’s so good.

[JEFF] We’ve got lettuce, and greens and chard, leeks and fennel, and turnips, and artichokes, and spinach, and cabbage, broccoli and about everything else you can get your hands on this time of year. Our farm is about two miles away from where we are selling right now at the farmer’s market.

[SHOPPER] It’s just amazing.

DUBNER: Santa Barbara County has a lot going for it: the beach, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and farming — it is in the top 1% of agriculture-producing counties in the U.S., about $1.2 billion worth a year. Now, imagine for a moment that everything is interrupted by some kind of a natural disaster:

David CLEVELAND: In 2005 there was a mudslide at La Conchita, which is a community in the southeastern part of Santa Barbara County, right on the coast.

CLEVELAND: And also blocked off the 101 freeway and the railroad, which are the main transportation connections with Los Angeles. And these transportation links were closed for at least a week.

DUBNER: So Santa Barbara couldn’t ship its produce down to the distribution centers in L.A., or anywhere else, nor could it ship produce in. But that wouldn’t seem to be a problem, since Santa Barbara grows so much. You’d think the grocery stores would still have plenty of fruits and veg.

CLEVELAND: So we had produce sections that were empty. And here’s farmers with boxes of harvested fruit and vegetables that they can’t, their distributors can’t pick them up. And so farmers said oh yeah we went and talked to the produce manager at this grocery chain and we said look we got stuff that we can’t get out and you can’t get anything in, let’s make a deal. And they were told no, sorry, we got a contract.

DUBNER: Did you feel it was absurd or along the lines of borderline criminal?

CLEVELAND: Often those two things go together, I think.

[THEME]

ANNOUNCER: From WNYC and APM, American Public Media: This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner.

DUBNER: Today, the second episode of our two-part podcast, “You Eat What You Are.” Last time out, we heard from the food-obsessed economist Tyler Cowen.

Tyler COWEN: There’s another kind of food snob where everything has to be like a farmer’s market, everything has to be sustainable, everything has to be in some way modest or geared down, or hippie-like.

DUBNER: And from food-philosophers Michael Pollan and Alice Waters:

Michael POLLAN: You know, one of the things we need to do in this country is raise the prestige of farming, and recognize the work that good farmers do, which is really important to us. We depend on them, and yet they’re for most of us totally anonymous.

Alice WATERS: I do really believe that...I think that the work of the farmer, it needs to be elevated to a very important and vital place.

DUBNER: And so, today, we try to find out: is going local the way to go?